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Lewis Jones enjoys rock journalist Rich Cohen's The Sun and the Moon and The Rolling Stones

The best book about The Rolling Stones is obviously Keith Richards’s Life (2010), but there have been quite a few others. The bibliography of Rich Cohen’s contribution to the canon runs to six pages, which is impressive until one notices that it includes novels by Mikhail Bulgakov, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo, and also Cohen’s earlier book about the Chicago Bears football team. The reason for this eclecticism is that The Sun and the Moon and The Rolling Stones is as much about Cohen as it is about the Stones.

He was born in 1968, which was, he feels, too late. His generation is caught between the baby boomers, who consumed everything there was to consume, and the millennials, the boomers’ children, who have “remade the world into something virtual and cold”, leaving Cohen a tragic spectator. “When you turn 26,” he writes with bathos, “you realise you’ll never turn 25 again.”

Luckily for him, when he turned 26, Rolling Stone magazine commissioned him to follow the Stones on a tour of the United States, which put him in the middle of the most wonderful party, surrounded by “music, leather, eye shadow, Spanish heels, gin”. Marvelling at Cohen’s extreme youth, Richards asked him what it was like to live in a world where the Stones were always there: “For you, there’s always been the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones.”

Cohen had always worshipped the band with a quasi-religious fervour – when he first heard the cowbell that opens Honky Tonk Women it was “like a muezzin call, ushering me in to a new life” – and he adores Mick Jagger, with whom he worked on the script for the HBO series Vinyl. But he sees “something monstrous” about him.

His real hero is “Keef”. When the Rolling Stone article was published, Jagger’s publicist rang him to complain about the headline, “On the Road with the Rolling Stones”, saying that it would have been better titled “I Love Keith Richards and Want to Have His Baby”. “I suppose, in a sense,” Cohen writes with awful candour, “I really do want to have his baby.”

What began as a magazine story grew into an “epic”, as Cohen obsessively read everything he could about the band; sought out technicians and assistants, lovers and “drug buddies”; visited their houses, recording studios and the Swiss clinic where Keef kicked heroin. And this is the result.

He begins, naturally, in post-war England, which he gets slightly and endearingly wrong. He thinks, for example, that Islington is “north of London”, and that we’ve maintained a standing army “since time out of mind”. But he gets the general idea of poverty in black and white, before the Technicolor prosperity of the Sixties; and that rock music – specifically the Delta blues, by way of Chicago – delivered Keef from “a s----- house on a bombed-out street in Dartford” to the life of a debauched medieval princeling.

Amusingly pretentious (“You waited for the next record as people once waited for the next pamphlet by Voltaire”), Cohen traces the Stones’ now familiar path from the legendary first gigs in Richmond, the ruthless dropping of the pianist Ian Stewart because he looked “homely”, to the first hits, the hysterical provincial tours and the amicable rivalry with the Beatles (“love from the Beatles, sex from the Stones”), and onwards to America, the Redlands drug bust, the death of Brian Jones (“Like Jesus, Brian died so they did not have to”) and their lucrative “abomination” of corporate rock.

“At the beginning,” Cohen writes, “they imitated black blues musicians. At the end, they imitated themselves.” In recent decades Mick and Keef have become “like a bitter married couple who stay together for the kids. Only the kids are grown. Or maybe the money is the kids.”

There are minor revelations on the way: such as that when the promoter Sam Cutler first introduced the Stones as “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world”, at the free concert in Hyde Park in 1969, he was being sarcastic, as he had heard them earlier in rehearsal and they were atrociously bad – “I mean, terrible!” Or that the opening riff of Jumpin’ Jack Flash is that of Satisfaction, backwards.

British readers may find the psycho-autobiographical aspects of his narrative hard to swallow, but Cohen is astute about the music: Keef’s distinctive open G chord, for example, “a voice that wheezes when it laughs, that’s full of whisky, late nights, and trouble”.

He’s right that they made their best albums during what he calls their “Golden Run”, from Beggars Banquet (1968) to Exile on Main Street (1972), and that they haven’t made a good one since Some Girls (1978). A lesser critic would have plodded through their subsequent efforts, but Cohen has the taste and decency to ignore them.